Let's further explore this matter of the church’s public services and the family pew as the primary place of Christian nurture. As we have noted, many well-meaning but misinformed leaders in the Christian world would have you running hither, thither, and yon to find the magic formula for spiritual growth. They would have you out every night attending meetings for prayer, study, and fellowship. They thrust before you countless tapes, study books, methods, techniques, seminars, retreats, and programs, each promising to provide the key to your spiritual well-being and happiness. Our response is—it is not that complicated. Whatever is of fundamental importance for the Christian life has been known in every era and is reproducible in every culture. If a thing is true and necessary, it can be understood and practiced in a primitive, grass-hut civilization, an igloo, and in modern America. This is not to say that the toys of modernity can't help. We make profitable use of the tapes, videos, telephones, faxes, and computers. We access the modern means of transportation. But we shouldn't lose sight of the greater reality that all that we need to thrive spiritually may be found down the block at our local evangelical church through its regular ministry and worship. In its failure to recognize this, the church today is little better than the world in unnecessarily contributing to the frenetic pace of modern life.

What can we do? Slow down. Stay home. Quit running mindlessly all over town. Limit yourself. And do this: commit yourself to the Lord's Day in the Lord's house and little else outside of the home will be necessary for the cultivation of a thriving spiritual life.

The Puritans referred to the Lord's Day as "the market day of the soul." Six days a week one buys and sells for the sake of one’s body. Sunday however we are to “trade” in spiritual commodities for the sake of our souls. All secular affairs are to be set aside. All Christians, after a "due preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand," are to "not only observe an holy rest, all the day, from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations," but also are to be engaged, "the whole time, in the public and private exercises of His worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy" (Westminster Confession of Faith, XXI. 7). In other places we have argued the biblical case for the continuing obligation to keep the Lord's Day (e.g. our booklet, "Observing the Sabbath"(3)). We won't repeat the case now. Instead we will assume its validity and assert on the basis of it that the key to the consistent attendance at public worship (of which we have spoken above as the key to your spiritual well-being) is a commitment to observing the Christian Sabbath. Or to state it negatively, you will never be able to become consistent about attending public worship until you are convinced that Sunday is not just the Lord's morning, but the Lord's Day.

When the writers of the Westminster Confession joined into one chapter "Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day," they knew what they were doing. We are the first generation of American Protestants to have forgotten the benefits of the Sabbath command. Prior to the middle of this century, all American Protestant denominations, whether Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, or Episcopalian, were Sabbatarian. This was true for over 300 years, dating from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in l630 until the mid-1960s. For generations it was understood that the Sabbath was made for man, for man's benefit (Mk 2:27, 28). But once again we have become too clever for our own good. We have crammed our schedules full of activity seven days a week. We have lost our Sabbath rest in the process. What have we given up? Hughes Old has recently written, “Any attempt at recovering a Reformed spirituality would do well carefully to study the best of the Puritan literature on the observance of the Lord's Day.”(4) How is this so? What is the point?

Essentially it comes down to this. If you are not convinced that the whole of Sunday is the Lord's and not yours, you will not be consistent. You will inevitably allow other matters to interfere. Things will come up. Even the best of us will become three-fifths Christians: three out of five Sundays we will be in church. The other two we will be out of town, watching a ball game, traveling, entertaining out-of-town guests, slightly under the weather, preparing for a busy Monday, out too late on Saturday, and so on. Let me challenge you–count it up. You might be surprised at how much you miss. Though you see yourself as there "every Sunday," even you miss two out of five.

Return for Sunday night worship? Forget it. For many of those who are members of the few churches that still conduct Sunday night services, it’s once a month at best. If Sunday is not the Lord's Day, who is going to bother? You might be convinced that it is good to be there, the singing is good, the preaching is, well, the preaching. But if it is not the Lord's Day, then one is likely to spend part of the afternoon at the mall, on the ballfield, in the garden, cleaning the house, in front of the tube. By Sunday night, one will be too tired, except every fourth Sunday or so when guilt overwhelms inertia. The cumulative effect of this is significant. Instead of the ministry of 104 Sunday services, one drops to under forty-five, thirty Sunday mornings and about twelve Sunday nights. Just like that you have forsaken the assembling of the saints and been deprived of the means of grace on something like sixty occasions in a single year. How do you propose to make it up? The best of us will seek to compensate by adding mid-week spiritual commitments. This will help, but only at the cost of hyping-up one's schedule in the process. For most, however, nothing will be done. The loss is absolute.

But, if you are convinced that Sunday is the "market day of the soul," then it changes everything. The question of the Sunday services is settled–you will be there AM and PM.

Rev. Terry Johnson is the Senior Pastor at Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Georgia.

This article is taken from "The Family Worship Book: A Resource Book for Family Devotions" by Terry Johnson (ISBN 978-1-85792401-5) which is published by Christian Focus Publications (www.christianfocus.com) and is used here with their kind permission.

3. Available from the Independent Presbyterian Church Bookshop, P.O. Box 9266, Savannah, GA 31412-9266. See also Walter Chantry, Call the Sabbath a Delight (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), and Joseph Pipa, The Lord’s Day (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 1997).

4. Hughes O. Old, Christianity Today, “Rescuing Spirituality from the Cloister,” June 12, 1994.